System.BitConverter Class

Every now and again a new framework class comes to my attention. At DevWeek I was attending a talk on Cryptography and an incidental part of the talk featured the BitConverter class. This is a class in the System namespace and has a bunch of static methods that convert to and from a byte array.

The ToString(byte[]) method was the one that I saw being used. It takes an array of bytes and converts each byte to its 2 character hexadecimal equivalent. This is an alternative to Base64 encoding and is arguably more human-friendly.

Other methods on the BitConverter class allow you to convert between a byte array and numerical types:

For more details, see the MSDN documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.bitconverter(v=vs.110).aspx